Planned Giving

Get Involved

Locate the AABGU representative in your area and find out how you can plug in to your passions by supporting Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. You can also read about how BGU is impacting your local community.

News & Videos

Read about the many ways BGU is making a difference in the Negev, Israel and throughout the world. View videos that highlight the students, researchers and faculty who are turning David Ben-Gurion’s vision into a reality.

Research at BGU

Discover how BGU is advancing research in the sciences and the humanities. Bringing together the best and brightest Israeli and international researchers, BGU encourages collaboration and strives for excellence.

About

Learn about Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel’s most innovative institution of higher learning and research, and how AABGU is helping fulfill David Ben-Gurion’s vision for Israel’s Negev region.

Revealing an Individual’s Neural Fingerprint

The Jewish Press – BGU researchers say people possess a “neural fingerprint” – a magnitude of variability in brain activity that is unique and individual.

Dr. Ilan Dinstein

Their findings, recently published in eNeuro, hold promise for identifying and assessing the severity of neurological and psychiatric disorders, including autism and attention deficit disorder.

According to the researchers, most people assume that when they see the same thing repeatedly, their brain responds in an identical, reproducible manner. But actually, brain responses vary dramatically from one moment to the next and, most importantly, the magnitude of this variability is a stable individual trait.

“The magnitude of this brain variability is pretty much the same regardless of what the subjects are doing, whether they are performing one task or another,” explains research leader Dr. Ilan Dinstein, head of the Negev Autism Center.

“It is also consistent over time, even when we tested the subjects a year later. All of which means that each one of us has a specific magnitude of brain variability regardless of what we are doing.” In other words, we each have our own neural fingerprint.

Until now, the scientific consensus has held that brain variability/noise mostly depends on whether a person is paying attention (or not) to the task that they are performing. Dr. Dinstein and his team were able to show that, in fact, the task performed is a minor factor; the major factor is the person’s identity.

“We are now using EEG recordings during sleep in very young children to see if excessive variability is an early marker of at least some cases of autism.

“We hope that this may aid in early diagnosis and point to a specific neural problem in some of the autism cases. This will hopefully lead to specialized autism treatments that we are now developing at the Negev Autism Center.”